Although the title Raised by a Serial Killer sounds provocative, the memoir by April Balascio, daughter of Edward Wayne Edwards, is sensational only in terms of its excellence.

Edwards was a man of contrasts: an outgoing, life-of-the-party figure to outsiders, but a physically and emotionally abusive tyrant to his wife and five children. Balascio, the oldest, “never felt safe under his roof—ever.” And yet, she writes, “Because he was impulsive, playful, and fearless, we had adventures that other children could not have had.” 

By age 11, Balascio understood that her father was not only “a really, really bad father” but a “bad man.” Her childhood haunted her as an adult, “like a jigsaw puzzle I couldn’t put together because there were too many missing pieces.” Balascio writes, “We were poor, often hungry, moving from one dilapidated and filthy rental house to another, sometimes living in tents and campers and, once, in a barn.” They moved all the time—Ohio, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—sometimes cramming suddenly into a U-Haul truck with no warning. 

Long before being convicted of murder, Edwards published his own memoir, Metamorphosis of a Criminal, about the time before marrying Balascios’ mother. During his book tour, he appeared on TV and talked, “looking bashful and sweet,” about robbing a bank, escaping prison twice, being on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list and spending five years in a federal prison. He claimed to have left that life behind, portraying himself as a reformed family man. 

Balascio left home as soon as possible, but her father “never ceased to be the center of my universe, even as I tried to get out from under his control.” In 2009, Balascio, now a wife and mother, was surfing the internet when she realized that her father may have been responsible for the “Sweetheart Murders” of two 19-year-olds in Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1980. After she called the cold case hotline, Edwards was eventually arrested and imprisoned, found responsible for at least five killings between 1977 and 1996, possibly more. 

Balascio delivers page-turning tension as she describes her childhood, her later realization about her father’s crimes and finally, her search for additional victims. Like Tara Westover (Educated), she is a savvy survivor and a courageously skilled narrator. And as with Edward Humes’ The Forever Witness—another unputdownable book about solving a cold case—readers will find themselves utterly immersed.

As Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman opens, Callum Robinson and his father are trekking deep into a Scottish forest on a quest for timber. As we follow them, we are newcomers in this unfamiliar territory of dappled sunlight, damp air and still silence, surrounded by “hulking Scots pines [that] lurk in their own long shadow.” Along with his woodworking tools, Robinson brings his skills as a wordsmith; his writing is startlingly sensual and as vibrant and lush as the terrain he walks. He evokes the smell and feel of the “dry, earthy, fungal miasma” among the “woodland behemoths” that surround him.

Ingrained is as much the story of these woodlands as it is Robinson’s own journey from wayward teen to impassioned master woodworker. But he didn’t fully understand how much his virtuosic father had taught him, and how much he had, albeit reluctantly, learned, until he left home to find his own way. With his indomitable wife and business partner, Marisa, Robinson opens a storefront in Linlithgow, and business grows quickly—too quickly. Robinson finds himself frustrated behind a desk, fretting over near calamities and financial cliffhangers, instead of a workbench. When he comes to realize he prefers a workshop in the woods over paperwork and corporate bosses, Robinson finds his purpose.

The details are everything here, and in his own devotion to craft, Robinson leaves few out. On that trek deep into the woods, he goes “treasure hunting” at a mill and sorts the sought-after boards by their grain, look and feel. Robinson invites the reader into his workshop to smell the sawdust and wince when learning how a lathe can wreak havoc.

Best of all, thanks to the self-deprecating sense of humor in Robinson’s impressive storytelling, readers come to understand that you don’t need a crafty bone in your body to appreciate and celebrate the work of a master craftsman, or, as Robinson’s father taught him, to respect the creative mind at work. Ingrained makes an excellent case for doing exactly that, whether working with wood, words or, as so beautifully exemplified here, both.